Journal of Policy Analysis and Management
Volume 34, Issue 4, Fall 2015
1. Title: INTERPOL's Surveillance Network in Curbing Transnational Terrorism
Authors:Javier Gardeazabal andTodd Sandler
Abstract:This paper investigates the role that International Criminal Police Organization (INTERPOL) surveillance—the Mobile INTERPOL Network Database (MIND) and the Fixed INTERPOL Network Database (FIND)—played in the War on Terror since its inception in 2005. MIND/FIND surveillance allows countries to screen people and documents systematically at border crossings against INTERPOL databases on terrorists, fugitives, and stolen and lost travel documents. Such documents have been used in the past by terrorists to transit borders. By applying methods developed in the treatment-effects literature, this paper establishes that countries adopting MIND/FIND experienced fewer transnational terrorist attacks than they would have had they not adopted MIND/FIND. Our estimates indicate that, on average, from 2008 to 2011, adopting and using MIND/FIND results in 0.5 fewer transnational terrorist incidents each year per 100 million people. Thus, a country like France with a population just above 64 million people in 2008 would have 0.32 fewer transnational terrorist incidents per year owing to its use of INTERPOL surveillance. This amounts to a sizeable average proportional reduction of about 30 percent.
2. Title:Information Shocks and the Take-Up of Social Programs
Authors:David N. Figlio, Sarah Hamersma and Jeffrey Roth
Abstract:The causes of participation in social programs have been studied extensively, with prominent roles found for program rules and benefits. A lack of information about these programs has been suggested as a cause of low participation rates among certain groups, but it is often difficult to distinguish between the role of information sharing and other features of a neighborhood, such as factors that are common to people of the same ethnicities or socioeconomic opportunities, or uniquely local methods of program implementation. We seek to gain new insight into the potential role of information flows by investigating what happens when information is disrupted. We exploit rich microdata from Florida vital records and program participation files to explore declines in Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) participation during pregnancy among foreign-born Hispanics in the “information shock” period surrounding welfare reform. We identify how the size of these reductions is affected by having a high density of neighbors from the same place of origin. Specifically, we compare changes in WIC participation among Hispanic immigrants living in neighborhoods with a larger concentration of own-origin immigrants to those with a smaller concentration of own-origin immigrants, holding constant the size of the immigrant population and the share of immigrants in the neighborhood who are Hispanic. We find strong evidence that having a denser network of own-origin immigrants mediated the information shock faced by immigrant women in the wake of welfare reform.
3.Title:Low-Income Housing Development, Poverty Concentration, and Neighborhood Inequality
Authors:Matthew Freedman andTamara McGavock
Abstract:Considerable debate exists about the merits of place-based programs that steer new development, and particularly affordable housing development, into low-income neighborhoods. Exploiting quasi-experimental variation in incentives to construct and rehabilitate rental housing across neighborhoods generated by Low-Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) program rules, we explore the impacts of subsidized development on local housing construction, poverty concentration, and neighborhood inequality. While a large fraction of rental housing development spurred by the program is offset by a reduction in the number of new unsubsidized units, housing investment under the LIHTC has measurable effects on the distribution of income within and across communities. However, there is little evidence the program contributes meaningfully to poverty concentration or residential segregation.
4. Title:Collective Reputations Affect Donations to Nonprofits
Authors:Laura E. Grant and Matthew Potoski
Abstract:Maintaining their organization's reputation is an important challenge for nonprofit managers. Organizations are often linked via a common reputation within their industry or sector such that publicity about one organization can spill over to affect how stakeholders view its peers. The linkages of common reputations may be particularly pronounced among nonprofits because important dimensions of their quality are difficult to observe directly. In this paper, we show that when the third-party evaluator Charity Navigator rates nonprofits and displays ratings of their peers, it creates a collective reputation among groups of nonprofits performing similar functions in the same region. Through an analysis of 3,413 charities from 1993 through 2008, we find that donations to nonprofits rated by Charity Navigator rise and fall with the published Charity Navigator ratings of their peers. The effect appears to be due to the charity updating fundraising choices in response to the ratings rather than donor reactions. The presence of collective reputations has important implications for nonprofit management, such as collective self-regulation programs.
5. Title:The Impact of Home-Based Child Care Provider Unionization on the Cost, Type, and Availability of Subsidized Child Care in Illinois
Authors:Todd Grindal, Martin R. West, John B. Willett and Hirokazu Yoshikawa
Abstract:In February 2005, Illinois became the first U.S. state to grant home-based child care providers (HBCPs) the right to form a labor union in order to bargain collectively with the state government. This policy inspired similar efforts across the country and represents a potentially important direction for child care policy. To date, the implications of labor unions for the cost, type, and availability of subsidized child care have not been evaluated empirically. In this study, we examine the impact of granting Illinois HBCPs the right to form a labor union on (a) the type of child care (licensed vs. license-exempt/home-based vs. center-based) used by subsidy-receiving Illinois infants and toddlers; (b) the per-child cost of subsidized child care for infants and toddlers; and (c) the percentage of Illinois infants and toddlers who use child care subsidies. To conduct these analyses, we combine data from the Current Population Survey with Child Care and Development Fund administrative records on U.S. infants and toddlers whose families received child care subsidies during the period from 2002 to 2008. We use both a traditional difference-in-differences as well as a comparative case study with a “synthetic” control group approach. The synthetic control group approach improves on traditional comparative case studies by providing a transparent, empirical approach for constructing the counterfactual, documenting comparison units’ contribution to the synthetically created control group and detailing the degree to which the synthetic control group is, or is not, similar to the treated unit on preintervention measures of the outcome as well as on other selected characteristics. We find that subsidy-receiving Illinois infants and toddlers spent an average of between 6.4 and 7 percentage points more hours in licensed care settings, as compared to license-exempt settings, in the three years following child care unionization. We also find that between 0.7 and 1.1 percentage points fewer Illinois infants and toddlers used child care subsidies following unionization.
6. Title:Do Employers Prefer Workers Who Attend For-Profit Colleges? Evidence from a Field Experiment
Authors:Rajeev Darolia, Cory Koedel, Paco Martorell, Katie Wilson and Francisco Perez-Arce
Abstract:This paper reports results from a resume-based field experiment designed to examine employer preferences for job applicants who attended for-profit colleges. For-profit colleges have seen sharp increases in enrollment in recent years despite alternatives, such as public community colleges, being much cheaper. We sent almost 9,000 fictitious resumes of young job applicants who recently completed their schooling to online job postings in six occupational categories and tracked employer callback rates. We find no evidence that employers prefer applicants with resumes listing a for-profit college relative to those whose resumes list either a community college or no college at all.
7. Title:The Persistence of Poverty in the Context of Financial Instability: A Behavioral Perspective
Authors:Lisa A. Gennetian and Eldar Shafir
Abstract:We review recent findings regarding the psychology of decisionmaking in contexts of poverty, and consider their application to public policy. Of particular interest are the oft-neglected psychological and behavioral consequences of economic scarcity coupled with financial instability. The novel framework highlights the psychological costs of low and unstable incomes, and how these can transform small and momentary financial hurdles into long-lasting poverty traps. Financial instability, we suggest, not only has obvious economic ramifications for well-being, but it also creates the need for constant focus and attention, and can distract from the very opportunities otherwise designed to alleviate the effects of poverty. We describe a variety of public policy strategies that emerge from this perspective that are not readily apparent in conventional theories that permeate the design of social programs.
8. Title:Identifying Mechanisms behind Policy Interventions via Causal Mediation Analysis
Authors:Luke Keele, Dustin Tingley and Teppei Yamamoto
Abstract:Causal analysis in program evaluation has primarily focused on the question about whether or not a program, or package of policies, has an impact on the targeted outcome of interest. However, it is often of scientific and practical importance to also explain why such impacts occur. In this paper, we introduce causal mediation analysis, a statistical framework for analyzing causal mechanisms that has become increasingly popular in social and medical sciences in recent years. The framework enables us to show exactly what assumptions are sufficient for identifying causal mediation effects for the mechanisms of interest, derive a general algorithm for estimating such mechanism-specific effects, and formulate a sensitivity analysis for the violation of those identification assumptions. We also discuss an extension of the framework to analyze causal mechanisms in the presence of treatment noncompliance, a common problem in randomized evaluation studies. The methods are illustrated via applications to two intervention studies on pre-school classes and job-training workshops.